Strangely enough, cancer patients across the world seem to have come to terms with the fact that the most effective treatment against cancer - chemotherapy - actually destroys their immune system. In Latvia, however, a breakthrough ...

Mice with a severe aging disease live three times longer if they eat thirty percent less. Moreover, they age much healthier than mice that eat as much as they want. These are findings of a joint study being published today ...

The Arab uprising in 2010 and subsequent wars in the eastern Mediterranean region have had serious detrimental effects on the health and life expectancy of the people living in many of the 22 countries in the region, according ...

Why do some people want to live a very long time, while others would prefer to die relatively young? In a latest study, a team of researchers including Vegard Skirbekk, PhD, at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, ...

Unhealthy habits are costing Canadians an estimated six years of life, according to a study published today in PLOS Medicine. Researchers found that smoking, poor diet, physical inactivity, and unhealthy alcohol consumption ...

A UCLA study is the first to show that Latinos age at a slower rate than other ethnic groups. The findings, published in the current issue of Genome Biology, may one day help scientists understand how to slow the aging process ...

Most respondents across all ethnic and racial groups surveyed described loss of eyesight as the worst ailment that could happen to them when ranked against other conditions including loss of limb, memory, hearing, or speech, ...

Life expectancy

Life expectancy is the average number of years of life remaining at a given age. The term is most often used in the human context, but used also in plant or animal ecology and the calculation is based on the analysis of life tables (also known as actuarial tables). The term may also be used in the context of manufactured objects although the related term shelf life is used for consumer products. Life expectancy is heavily dependent on the criteria used to select the group. For example, in countries with high infant mortality rates, the life expectancy at birth is highly sensitive to the rate of death in the first few years of life. In these cases, another measure such as life expectancy at age 5 (e5) can be used to exclude the effects of infant mortality to reveal the effects of causes of death other than early childhood causes.